


i say "let's run away" when i just mean "stay the night"

by ayjayjay



Series: you don’t deserve yourself [1]
Category: South Park
Genre: Hangover, I never know what to tag lol., Kenny gets a hangover and Cartman is a dick: the fanfic, M/M, Other, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life, Underage Drinking, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:54:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26826211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayjayjay/pseuds/ayjayjay
Summary: For a long time, he doesn’t say anything, and Kenny starts to let his eyes drift closed under the assumption that Cartman’s hit the hay again as well, but Cartman pipes up just in time. “Why don’t you just go home?”“Why would I wanna do that?” Kenny whines.“Because,” Cartman says, voice muffled in his pillow. “I don’t want you here!”
Relationships: Eric Cartman/Kenny McCormick
Series: you don’t deserve yourself [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1933627
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	i say "let's run away" when i just mean "stay the night"

**Author's Note:**

> i have a lot of drafts that need to be cleaned up, so here, take one! thanks for reading as always! :3 title is from the song "i think i need a new heart" by the magnetic fields. give their album '69 love songs' a listen if you're in the mood for melancholy thoughts about relationships!
> 
> this fic takes place pre-dropout for kenny, a year or two before 'i think you're a joke' takes place.

Kenny, feeling uncomfortably seasick despite lying stationary, cracks his eye open in the dim blue morning. He raises his head and tries to gather up knowledge of his surroundings, but he makes it halfway to vertical before nausea sends him back down against the pillows. 

Pillow...s. Plural. He’s definitely in  _ someone’s _ bed, but not his own. It’s warm, almost uncomfortably hot, even with the window open and the Colorado wind blowing across his cheeks. A thick arm wraps around Kenny’s waist from behind, and for a moment he freezes, but after the initial wave of nausea passes, he can’t help but grin about the hand splayed across his stomach. 

If he looks around, he will find a poster of Marilyn Manson pinned to the wall, beside an old stolen street sign and a few movie posters purchased at Stan’s dad’s old blockbuster, but he doesn’t, because he already knows it’s there.

_ Cartman’s room _ .

Kenny grins to himself, closing his eyes as he attempts rolling over into the aforementioned fat boy’s chest. There’s no protest; Cartman must still be asleep, which is fine with Kenny, who doesn’t really want to hear his mouth so early anyway. Turning over has done nothing but make his head pound, and he buries his face in Cartman’s meaty body and winces at his own hubris until he slips away again. 

The second time he wakes up it’s brighter out, and his brain is less mush on the floor of a house show. Cartman had shifted to sleeping at some point while Kenny was unconscious, and now he glares sleepily at him from across the sheets.

“Hey,” Kenny says, eyelids still heavy. He leans his pounding forehead on Cartman’s outstretched arm and smiles. 

Cartman clearly has other ideas; he gives Kenny a death glare and pulls his arm from under Kenny’s head, rolling himself over. For a long time, he doesn’t say anything, and Kenny starts to let his eyes drift closed under the assumption that Cartman’s hit the hay again as well, but Cartman pipes up just in time. “Why don’t you just go home?”

“Why would I wanna do that?” Kenny whines, squishing his face into Cartman’s upper back to bridge the gap. It’s a little more vulnerable than he usually gets around Cartman while they’re both awake and sober, but his brain is slamming into his skull and he just wants to be  _ held _ , dammit. He presses their bodies closer together once more, trying to wrap his arm around Cartman’s belly, but Cartman is having none of it. A pudgy hand attached to a surprisingly beefed up arm pushes him away from behind.

“Because,” Cartman says, voice muffled in his pillow. “I don’t want you here!”

Kenny, head spinning and mouth watering uncomfortably after being jolted, does the sensible thing and runs across the hall to the Cartmans’ bathroom. Though he doesn’t puke immediately, his stomach churns and he nurses it with his cheek pressed to the cold porcelain of the toilet, trying (and failing) not to think about how many times Cartman or his mom have ass-blasted the toilet he’s currently cuddled against. 

Eventually the nausea comes over him properly, but he gags up nothing but the rubbing alcohol taste in the back of his throat and a ton of spit. He lets out a final loogie and flushes the toilet anyway. Usually Cartman would be at his side by now, holding back his hair like it would even help and passing him a wad of toilet paper to wipe his involuntary tears. Kenny could close his eyes and lay his head against the warm solid shoulder behind him, and then Cartman would help him back to bed and give him a big glass of water and let Kenny sleep the hangover away in his bed while he went about his own life.

Cartman doesn’t come this time, though, and Kenny leans against the toilet for what feels like an eternity. Someone gently knocks on the door, and Kenny rights himself far too quickly, worried for some reason about Cartman or his mom seeing him in his sorry state. He wipes his nose on some toilet paper and stuffs it in his pocket, feeling queasy again as he opens the door.

“Oh, good morning,” she says cheerfully as he passes, as though Kenny is a completely normal encounter on her way to the bathroom. “Are you feeling okay? You look a little green!”

“Never better,” Kenny replies as he retreats to Cartman’s room, but he vomits into Cartman’s trash can as soon as the door clicks behind him. 

This time Kenny gets results; it looks like brain matter, or guts, or some other soggy and bloody part of the internal machine, slipping and sliding around in the bottom of Cartman’s trash in a red frothy pile. The smell of it, vodka and artificial cherry mixer and whatever snack food he had consumed, makes him feel nauseous long after his stomach is empty. Kenny gags again, but then sets the bin down and crosses the room to lay as gently as possible against Cartman’s mattress. He sighs, and his eyes slip closed again.

Cartman, like a true asshole, shoves Kenny as hard as he can off the bed as soon as he gets comfortable. Kenny’s head hits the floor first, a dull ache that feels like it’s pinballing around inside his cranium before ricocheting down the rest of his body once it joins him on the floor.

He sighs around it and doesn’t bother getting up. At least Cartman’s floor is cool. “What was that for?”

“I told you—get out!”

“What do you  _ mean _ get out?”

From out of his view, he hears Cartman huff, and then shuffling as Cartman peeks over the side of his bed to stare down at Kenny.

“Exactly what I said! You don’t pay rent, you freeloader, so get the fuck out.”

Kenny rubs his eyes with his fists and sighs again. The churning feeling in his gut is back as his body catches up with his tumble. He feels like a piece of laundry hung out on a wire, or like he’s been laminated. It’s too fucking early for Cartman to be starting his shit. Can’t a guy just cuddle his best friend through his hangover?

It’s enough to get his temper going, at least, and to give him a respite from thinking about his nausea. “I’m sorry,” he says, sounding not at all sorry and a little too much like Kyle. “I didn’t get the memo that you suddenly started to care if I was hanging out here. Three hours ago you were giving me the little spoon special.”

Cartman throws down Kenny’s discarded hoodie, beaning him right in the face. The string of the hoodie manages to jab him right in the eye on the descent, and he nurses it with a chorus of swears, tear duct leaking obnoxiously.  Naturally, Cartman gets a kick out of it. 

“Serves you right,” he says smugly. “You know, Kenny, I was being  _ nice  _ by letting you stay here last night. You almost  _ died _ climbing through my window. You were stumbling everywhere, could barely stand up on your own! You can’t just show up here any time you want to, you alcoholic dick!”

Kenny’s good eye blinks slowly. “Wuh—Why not?”

Cartman rolled his eyes, always dramatic. “For the same reason Beverly Hills cops pick up homeless people and drop them off somewhere else.”

“Gentrification...?”

“No—well, yes! But that’s because poor people make nice places ugly! And since my house is the nicest place there is, you can’t just come around, fucking… McCormick-ing it up any time you want!”

Despite his intimate knowledge of the way Cartman’s mind processes literally anything, the statement kind of catches Kenny’s feelings off guard. It’s not like Kenny doesn’t agree—it’s a small town, and the McCormicks are regulars at all community dinners and holiday potlucks, all five of them scrubbed up but still stinking like the outdoors in layer after layer of hand-me-downs, filing into places one after the other like the white trash Addams family. Kenny doesn’t really think about his ugly being  _ ugly _ all that often, unless he’s surrounded by things that bring it out. He doesn’t really think ‘poor-ing up the place’ is really the reason Cartman is being such a wet tampon to him, because it’s never something simple, but it still makes him feel shitty that he’s being a moocher. 

Kenny goes quiet, and Cartman does too. He takes several deep breaths, ignoring the fat form waiting impatiently on the bed, staring up at Cartman’s popcorn ceiling until he feels like he won’t say something to make Cartman feel bad. Then, he stands up. His stomach slips around anong his guts uncomfortably again, but he pulls his hoodie on in silence and trots down the stairs anyway.

“Kenny, wait—” Cartman protests loudly, clearly intent on playing Coon-and-Mysterion flirting games all morning, but Kenny doesn’t. He’s too tired, too nauseous, too stubborn to play along. He just wants to go home, to sleep on his saggy mattress and chainsmoke in his bedroom and have a PBR pilfered from his father’s beaten up 24-pack until his hangover fades away.

He passes Cartman’s mom, already cooking some sort of sweet-smelling breakfast amalgamation that both stirs and upsets Kenny’s appetite. “Kenny,” she calls after him. “Did you want something to eat too? I’m almost finished with Eric’s breakfast now!”

Kenny smiles at her, and his stomach growls quietly against the chatter on the TV beside him. “No thanks, Ms. Cartman,” he says, slipping around the coffee table to make his exit. “You can give my portion to Eric, too. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

As he walks down the sidewalk in the direction of Tegridy Farms, intent on retrieving his truck, he forces himself not to look back at Cartman’s house. It was just a small part of the bravado-filled pre-argument arguments they often had; if he showed his weakness to Cartman, undoubtedly watching Kenny’s retreat now from his stupid street-facing window, he will never hear the end of it. Instead, he lights up a cigarette from his crumpled pack and strolls straight into Butters’ yard, where he’s plucking weeds from his mother’s ugly flowerbed. Oh well, he thinks, at least he left Cartman with a trash can full of his vomit.

“What’s up, buttercup?” Kenny says, leaning against the side of the Scotch house.

“I’m surprised you’re awake this early,” Butters shoots back cheerily, eye catching on the cherry of Kenny’s cigarette and the pallor of his skin. “Stan was lookin’ real wobbly last night, so I figured you’d both be outta commission today.”

“Aww,” Kenny pouts dramatically. “Poor baby. Whenever he’s up later I’ll bring him some Funyuns and soda for his tummy.”

“What about you?” Butters asks, sitting back on his haunches. 

Kenny can’t help but notice there’s a stripe of dirt across his face, like a dark brown scar, probably from wiping at his forehead or swatting away a bug. Butters is too cute. In another life, Kenny is in love with him, and with the him inside of him, and the her inside of the him inside of him, too. In this life, though, Kenny is in like with the satisfaction of knowing Butters likes him, with  _ making _ Butters like him, and guilty in equal parts because he’s self-aware.

“What  _ about _ me?” he says. 

“What about your tummy, silly?”

“Oh,” Kenny grins sheepishly. “I’m fine. I threw it all up, so I’m just going to go home to eat nothing but white bread and saltines until I can think straight.”

“You threw up?” Butters stares at him with furrowed eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

“People tend to do that when they have hangovers, dude. Prevents alcohol poisoning sometimes or something, I dunno. You’ll understand whenever you decide to start drinking. If you drink too much, it’s gotta come back up or you’ll die.”

“Sounds kinda disgusting.”

“It’s how you learn your limit! For example, last night I learned that me and Stan can’t finish most of a bottle of vodka together or we’ll both puke.”

“Almost dying ain’t really somethin’ you should be too proud of, I think.”

“It’s better than  _ really _ dying,” Kenny says. He shakes rigor mortis from his posture and sighs, puffing on his neglected cigarette. “And besides, I’m—I took care of it. I’m  _ fine _ .”

Butters hums skeptically, tugging up a particularly wide knot of nutgrass and smashing the roots with the side of his trowel. It’s satisfying work—sometimes Ms. Marsh pays Kenny to give her backyard the same treatment—but Kenny feels too shitty and ugly to go traipsing in the mud beside Cartman’s house with Butters today. 

“Didn’t you just come out of Eric’s house, though?”

“Damn,” Kenny says. “You saw that?”

Butters grins and shakes his head. “Even if I didn’t, you left your tracks from here to there!”

Kenny stares down at his boots, then across the thin dusting of snow he’d passed through. “Damn,” he says again, shaking his own head.

Butters smiles, tapping his trowel along another clump of roots. “I’m glad you ended up somewhere safe! I was worried about you makin’ it home okay! I mean, I know Stan had Kyle but—and this ain’t no indication of my feelings towards him—I thought for sure Eric would’a left you somewhere!”

Kenny snorts. “You never get close enough to know, but Cartman is really sweet when he’s not, like, expecting to have to be an asshole. You should see him in the morning when he wakes up, or on the walk home with someone.”

Cartman isn’t sweet so much as he is unashamedly needy. At parties, he wanders around with his little red cup actively looking for Kenny, and everyone Kenny talks to asks ‘did Cartman ever find you?’. He waits by his car for Kenny whenever they ride home from school together without being asked, but gets pissed off when Kenny talks too long in the parking lot anyway. When they’re both at home sometimes, he’ll call Kenny just to talk about whatever he’s impassioned about at the moment, even if he hangs up after an hour because Kenny doesn’t get riled up the right way. Needy and sweet… weren’t they the same thing, when dealing with someone like Cartman?

“That’s pretty unsurprising,” Butters says, and he smiles up at Kenny in a tight sort of way. Kenny leaves after that, ruffling Butters’ hair as he starts the long walk back to Tegridy Farms.

He manages to get a ride most of the way there from Stan’s uncle Jimbo, who screams over Johnny Cash about football and Stan and whatever else. Kenny mostly tunes him out, thinking about Cartman and wishing he could smoke in Jimbo’s car. His organs churn the whole way; Kenny doesn’t get carsick easily, but when they pull up into the gravel driveway, Kenny pops the car door and escapes to the fresh air before the car even stops rolling, expelling the red of the candy-red contents of his stomach on a patch of wildflowers by the Marsh family mailbox. It slinks down leaves and petals like slime. Kenny sucks in his saliva, his snot, his tears, and hocks a loogie straight down.

He had initially planned on just retrieving his truck and leaving, but Stan is by the shed near where Kenny had parked, bouncing a basketball against the faded faux-brick siding and looking a bit pale. When he spots Kenny, Stan grins, holding out a hand for Kenny to accept; he does, and they pull one another close for just a moment. 

“How are you?” Kenny asks, though he knows the answer. Stan had an abnormally weak stomach, and had naturally thrown up the contents of it in Kenny’s presence, sleeping off the hangover entirely and waking up almost daisy-fresh. Kenny, by comparison, feels like a walking corpse, sweaty and unkempt.

“I’m okay,” Stan replies, because Stan never says he’s good. “Do you want to come take a shower or something?” 

Kenny rolls his tongue around in his mouth as though he’s considering saying no, but he’s already walking towards Stan’s house with him.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was written the day after valentine's day this year, when i got extremely uncomfortably drunk when i went out with a friend and i flaked on my plans with my (ex-)boyfriend because i ended up puking and passing out at my brother's house like an asshole. 
> 
> (yikes)


End file.
